When
Eman el-Obeidy materialized in the breakfast room of the Rixos Hotel in
Tripoli, Libya, the story she told shocked the world. The 29-year-old
woman, a law graduate, claimed to have been held and raped by 15 members
of leader Muammar Qaddafi's forces after being stopped at a checkpoint.
The bruises on her face, the blood on her thighs, and the wails issuing
from her throat made it clear that something bad had happened. Any
doubt that remained was dispelled by the swift, vicious reaction of the
security forces in the hotel (including many who had been posing as
hotel waitstaff -- no, they were not just innocently pouring coffee and
busing tables for the press corps each morning), who dragged her out of
the reach of the stunned journalists and shoved her in a waiting car.

While
el-Obeidy's courage was exceptional, her experience may not be. In the
two months since her story broke, scattered reports have emerged of rape
by Qaddafi's forces in Misrata and elsewhere around the country, often
recounted by medical workers. Chilling details -- reports of condoms and
sexual performance enhancers found in the pockets of captured soldiers,
for example -- have prompted International Criminal Court Special
Prosecutor Luis-Moreno Ocampo to liken Viagra to a "machete," that
low-tech weapon used to such terrible effect during the Rwandan
genocide. In April, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice told a private gathering
of diplomats that the U.S. believed Qaddafi's military was handing out
Viagra pills to troops "so they go out and rape," as Rice reportedly put
it. Last week, Ocampo told CNN that he plans to launch an investigation into these accounts.

Is anyone surprised? Since ancient times (think of Nicholas Poussin's painting, "The Rape of the Sabine Women,"
which depicts the fabled 8th-century BC episode in which Rome's first
generation of men abducted women from the neighboring region), men
locked in combat have often viewed the other side's women as part of the
spoils: war booty, so to speak. A few examples, among many:
the Rape of Nanking; World War II, during which American GIs, Germans,
and Russians all took their liberties; the Bangladeshi War of
Independence, in which an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 women were raped
in nine months; Vietnam, where South Vietnamese and Americans were
widely known to rape; Peru, Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s;
the horrifying rape camps of Bosnia and Herzegovina; the nightmarish stories and statistics
from conflicts all over Africa, and even American servicewomen's
reports of assaults by their male colleagues. Again, is anyone
surprised?

As the Nobel Women's Initiative notes,
sexual violence in conflict "takes place in every region of the world ...
reasons for [its] use vary from region to region and conflict to
conflict." But that doesn't mean everyone's raping. In fact, a growing
body of scholarly research on sexual violence in conflict suggests that
it is decidedly not inevitable, making it all the more imperative to take action against it. (Incidentally, the raping of hotel staff by powerful, wealthy guests is not inevitable either.)

"The
fact that this particular subset of the population, which shares a
particular social and political profile, is targeted more often than
other groups, suggests that it is not the case that soldiers are
randomly and opportunistically raping anyone they encounter," she said.
"For this type of violence, they are targeting particular individuals
whom they deem to be opponents of the state."

It's important to
remember, she says, that across conflicts, there is "a huge variation"
in who rapes, who is raped, and why. "All of that complexity suggests
that this is not just an inevitable consequence of war."

In her
work on sexual violence in civil wars over the past three decades, Dara
Kay Cohen, Assistant Professor at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs
at the University of Minnesota, has identified several factors that
increase the likelihood that widespread rape will occur in a given
conflict, including one unexpected one: the method of recruitment.
Forcibly recruited men, she argues, meld into a cohesive unit through
gang rape, a process she calls "combatant socialization." A risky,
time-consuming, and inefficient practice (as opposed to swiftly lopping
off someone's head), gang-rape, she writes, "creates loyalty and esteem
from ... initial circumstances of fear and mistrust."

In other
words, strange men thrown together in an impromptu fighting force use it
as an unspoken means to build team spirit. The public, performative
nature of gang rape carries a different message ("We're all in this
together") than an individual rape perpetrated in private ("I'm doing
this right now because a breakdown of law and order means I can get away
with it.")

Examining data from all 86 civil conflicts from 1980
to 2009, Cohen found that the presence of two of the most commonly
accepted explanations for mass rape -- a culture of gender inequality
and ethnic tensions -- do not predict its occurrence. Instead, state
collapse and the aforementioned need for bonding between combatants are
more reliable indicators.

Her interpretation tracks with statements from captured pro-Qaddafi Libyan soldiers, who have claimed they were forced to rape
by their commanding officers. "We felt scared, but when we refused to
rape, they started to beat us," one 17-year-old soldier told the BBC. It
was his first sexual encounter, he said. A Libyan soldier who was
captured in Zintan as part of a group of loyalist fighters, which
included men from Chad and Sudan, told Al Jazeera English
that army troops "Were given orders no human being can accept. We were
told that any house we entered was ours, any vehicle we wanted was ours,
any girl we found, we could rape. Everything was for us." He also
mentioned Viagra.

The international rights group Human Rights
Watch says it has not yet been able to confirm these reports. But
women's rights researcher Nadya Khalife, a specialist in the region with
Human Rights Watch, said she "definitely believes there are cases out
there." Indeed, el-Obeidy also told reporters that a 16-year-old girl suffered a similar assault
alongside her. This lack of direct testimony, el-Obeidy excepted, is
perhaps one reason why most American news outlets have been hesitant to
report aggressively on this subject.

The process of documenting
these attacks will be slow-moving and delicate, said Nadje Al-Ali, a
professor of Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African
Studies in London, who has researched sexual violence in Iraq. "I
definitely think that the honour issue and the social stigma attached to
rape is a big issue in terms of preventing women from coming forward,"
she said. "But then there is also the possibility that the soldiers are
only boasting and are trying to hurt the rebel men this way."

As
Leiby notes, the social stigma and the feelings of shame that come from
being raped are not unique to Arab or Muslim societies, although
attitudes about female purity are deeply rooted in Libya. But
el-Obeidy's stunning bravery may have inspired some to discard the
outdated views that hold women responsible for the honor of her family
or tribe . Speaking from the safety of exile in Doha, Qatar, she told CNN that she has experienced an immense outpouring of support.

"In
the past an Arab women that goes through what I gone through is
something shameful but now our society has changed and now everyone
feels with me and shows me love."